I was working with a client who was making a viz about nursing homes that had nested parameters; one that changes what group you were looking at (staff, short stay resident, long stay resident) and one that chooses what statistics for that group you are looking at. We needed a way to direct the end user which of the parameter controls to use when, so I came up with this:

I have a sheet behind each parameter control that changes color if the corresponding parent parameter is selected. The sheet is actually a treemap with a calculation on size that just equals 1. Color is chosen by a calculated field that looks at the parameter and gives a value of either “Active” or “Inactive”. So if you are looking at staff, the staff stats box is highlighted and if you change to short stay residents, the short stay residents box is highlighted.

What do y'all think? Does this make the dashboard sufficiently user friendly for an end user who doesn't know what parameters are?

That is very creative. While a user could still make an incorrect selection, the use of color to direct them to the desired drop-down is elegant and effective. I do hope that in a future release of Tableau, parameters could be hidden/exposed based on other parameters selections, or have different values appear in parameter B based on the selection made in parameter A.

And right after I wrote that last sentence, I popped over to the Ideas page and noticed that Dynamic Parameters is the top-voted idea. This community is pretty cool.

Thanks for the compliments, everyone! I think something that could really add to this technique would be if there was a way to have better control over the styling of parameters. If they had transparent backgrounds, the highlighting would be even more clear and the controls would look a lot more intentional.